


War Wounds

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Kastrup, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 11:04:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5245967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Both Sigrun and Mikkel have scars from the silent world, although they got them in very different ways. Sigrun’s are the souvenirs of a lifetime of close calls. Mikkel’s run deeper, and they all lead back to Kastrup.</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Wounds

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically the unofficial sequel to ‘Old Memories’, one of my very first fanfics for SSSS. Hopefully it holds up!

Mikkel had told their young stowaway that people often had bad dreams on their first night in the silent world. What he had not told the poor lad was that you’d have them on a lot of other nights as well.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked, stepping through from the crew compartment to the cabin of the tank, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He had woken to use the toilet and had noticed on his way back to bed the connecting door was open, spilling cold moonlight across the battered wood floor.

Sat in the passenger seat, her booted feet up on the dashboard, Sigrun looked at his reflection in the window and grunted. “Dunno,” she grunted. “Haven’t tried.”

Mikkel didn’t believe her, and from what he could see of her expression, she didn’t expect him to. He leaned on the wall next to her.

“Bad dreams?” he asked.

Sigrun shrugged. A small part of her was tempted to tell him, about the smothering nightmares that she seemed to get once or twice every time she went out into the silent world. Old world ghosts and dead friends crowding her sleep, screaming her name, clawing at her. But a larger, sterner part of her knew that people didn’t like to hear that sort of thing from their commanding officer, and she kept quiet.

Mikkel straightened up and went wordlessly back into the crew quarters, re-emerging a moment later with his doctor’s bag in one hand. He sat down in the driver’s seat next to her and undid the clasps. “I’ve got something in here to help you sleep, if you want,” he said, rooting around and holding up a little bottle full of small white tablets.

Sigrun rolled her eyes and snorted. “Gods, no,” she said with a small smile. “I took those once, back when I was just a private. They worked a bit too well. I nearly slept through a troll attack! So thanks, but no thanks.”

Mikkel nodded and slipped the pills back into the bag. “In that case,” he murmured, “I might have something else…” Out came another bottle, slightly larger than a hip flask. It had the words ‘Dr Madsen’s Private Reserve’ scrawled across it in black pen, underneath a crude skull-and-crossed-bones.

Sigrun grinned. “Now you’re speaking my language, doc.” She reached across and took the bottle from him, unscrewed the top and took a slug. She was fine for about a second and then her eyes bulged wide and she bent over, coughing and gasping.

“ _Helsike!_ ” she spluttered, passing it back to him with trembling hands. “What in the gods’ names is in that?”

“Danish medicine,” Mikkel deadpanned, and took a small sip himself. He grimaced as the alcohol burned down his throat and seemed to light a small fire in his stomach. “Powerful stuff.”

Sigrun found enough breath to laugh. “I’ll say,” she chuckled. She shook her head and blinked a few times.

There was a comfortable silence for a few moments, and then Sigrun frowned turned to face him with a raised eyebrow. “So tell me, doc, why are _you_ up at this hour?”

Mikkel had hoped she wouldn’t think to ask. He should have known better.

“Oh, I woke up…” _(back on Oresund, lower decks, guns in the distance, sirens on the air, trying to stitch the poor man beneath my hands closed, knowing he was gone, doing it anyway)_ “…to use the toilet. Didn’t you hear?”

Now it was Sigrun’s turn not to believe him, and his turn not to expect her to. Neither of them pressed the issue. They both knew nothing good would come of it.

They talked about other things instead, passing the bottle back and forth occasionally, Sigrun taking much more cautious sips this time. After a while the topic moved onto the weather, and how Sigrun could always tell it was going to snow because her scars would ache. And that, almost inevitably, led to her boasting about all the scars she’d collected.

“Now this one,” she said with a definite note of pride in her voice, pulling up the side of her sweater to show a ragged scar running between her hips and ribcage, “I got from a giant. Back in, oh, 87? 86? Ambushed our convoy as we were leaving the town. Just tore open the truck behind mine and started eating.” She frowned, dropped her sweater back down and rolled up her left sleeve to point at a semicircle of small divots in her bicep. “Troll gave me these outside Bergen once. Had teeth like knives, the little bastard. Head held on for dear life even after I’d ripped the rest of its body off.” She grinned at the memory.

Not all her scars were from battles, as it turned out. At least one of them was a souvenir from a very angry man who had reached for a knife upon coming home to find Sigrun in bed with his wife. The man had managed to get one good slash in before receiving a lesson on why you don’t pull a knife on a professional soldier.

“In my defence, I was very drunk,” Sigrun said sheepishly. “Otherwise he’d never have stood a chance.”

Mikkel had never heard the ‘I was drunk’ defence used in _that_ way before. He tried to keep his laughter down so he didn’t wake the rest of the crew.

“So what about you, doc?” Sigrun asked, leaning back and resting one cheek on her fist. “Any scars worth sharing? Your days milking cows as dangerous as I’ve been lead to believe?” she smirked.

Ordinarily he would have lied. But after a few mouthfuls of Danish ‘medicine’ his wits were dull, and he let his mouth run away from him.

“Only one,” he said, rolling up his right sleeve. From wrist to elbow, down the outside of his arm, was a scar that tracked so straight and true that it could have been drawn on with a ruler.

Sigrun whistled softly. “What did that?”

“A bullet.”

“Wow.” She frowned, looking genuinely worried. “Is milking cows _that_ dangerous?”

“More so than you could possibly imagine, but that’s another story,” Mikkel answered with a straight face.

“So what’s the story behind this then?”

“It’s a long one.”

“I’ve got the time.”

Which was not the response Mikkel had wanted to hear.

 

* * *

 

Sunrise over Oresund, five days after Kastrup. And how quickly, Mikkel thought as he pushed the plastic flaps aside and stepped out of the makeshift triage ward, Kastrup had become an event, a point in time. No longer a place you were, but a thing you survived.

The rising winter sun caught him full in the face, low enough on the horizon to glare through the gaps between the decks, and he raised a hand to shield his eyes as he logged his actions on the small clipboard hung next to the door. Quickly, mechanically, he stripped off his apron, gloves and face mask and dropped them in a bucket for washing. Only five days in and this had become routine, as if he had been doing this for five years. Perhaps he had. Sometimes he found it hard to remember.

One of the medics replacing him caught his eye as she struggled into her own ill-fitting gear. “How bad is it in there?” she asked him, a severe-looking woman of about forty with her greying black hair tied up in a vicious bun.

Mikkel didn’t answer.

“That bad, huh?” she asked, and swore. “Well, best get to it,” she muttered. She clapped her hand on his shoulder and hurried inside.

Protocol demanded that he report to the duty officer in the makeshift command tent a few metres away. They needed everyone they could get, preferably doing ten jobs at once. But instead he turned on his heel and walked in the opposite direction, striding purposefully like a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

He crossed the deck, taking a shortcut down the side of the armoury and passing by one of the enormous struts that held the next deck up like an iron cloud above their heads. He heard snatches of conversations as he passed people, soldiers of all ranks hurrying this way and that, and tried very hard not to listen to them.

“…twelve more infected…”

“…this damn quarantine is killing us…”

“…everything, we need more of _everything_...”

“...nine more days…”

People shouting into phones to the upper levels, people shouting at each other, people shouting at nothing at all. Mikkel blocked them out as best he could and pushed his way through the crowds, aiming for the other end of the deck.

He skirted the shaft of one of the enormous cargo elevators that had all been shut down due to the quarantine and made his way to the railings at the edge of the deck. He checked behind him. A cargo container hid him from the rest of the Oresund Base. Good. Finally breaking into a run, he sprinted the last few metres to the edge and was violently sick over the side.

He vomited until he thought there must surely be nothing left to come, and then he vomited some more, dry-heaving flecks of bile into the icy waters below. At last he stopped, bent double and gasping for air, his hands clammy and his mouth burning. He straightened up and leaned against the railings, wiping cold sweat from his brow.

“Feeling better?” a voice to his left chuckled.

Mikkel look around and saw a man about his age leaning against the railings, his arms folded on top of the metal, facing the rising sun. He’d been in such a hurry to get to the railings he hadn’t noticed there was anyone else there.

The man had a neat beard and wore the uniform of a soldier. The patches on his shoulders said tank battalion. “Lovely morning,” he said, as if this was just another day on the base.

Mikkel, still out of breath, just offered a wordless gunt.

“Won’t last,” the man said. “They say the cold’s coming back. Pity it didn’t come back sooner,” he sighed.

“Hmm,” Mikkel murmured, finally starting to recover.

“What brought that on?” the man asked. “You haven’t got the Illness, have you?” Normally someone would ask a question like that with wide eyes and panic in their voice, but the man asked like he was referring to a minor cold.

Mikkel shook his head. “Medical tents,” was all he could find the energy to say.

“Ah. You a doctor?”

“Something like that.”

“Hmm. On this level, or lower down?”

“This level,” Mikkel said. He looked over at the man again. “Why?”

“Haven’t you heard, friend?” the man asked.

“I’ve been working for five days straight. I don’t know what I’ve heard anymore,” Mikkel murmured.

The man barked a humourless laugh. “Lowest deck is where they’re quarantining confirmed cases. I overheard someone say that there are so few people working down there that infectees are halfway through turning before they can mercy-kill them.” He held up a hand, as if he was a teacher asking a class for silence. “You hear that?”

Mikkel listened. He heard lots of things. “Hear what?”

“Those engines. Down below.”

Of course Mikkel could hear them. They’d been part of the background noise of Oresund for five days now. If he’d thought anything of them, he’d assumed they were emergency generators. “So what?” he asked.

“Those are tank engines,” the man said. Mikkel frowned in confusion.

“I should know,” the man continued. “Now why do you think they’re running the tank engines, when there’s nowhere for the tanks to go?”

“Beats me,” Mikkel replied, trying to work out where the hell this man was going with all this.

“Simple, friend. They’re running the engines so we on the above decks can’t hear the screams.”

There was a silence between them, filled with the chatter of the deck and the rumble of the engines, as Mikkel processed this information. Something nasty crawled up his spine and he was suddenly very glad he had already been sick.

“One of the tanks down there is mine,” the man said quietly, turning a little to face him. Mikkel saw the name patch on his uniform. T Hansen. “I was there, you know. I’m a driver. _Was_ a driver. The Goliath tanks, the big ones, you know them?”

Mikkel nodded.

“I drove us out to the green perimeter, when we thought it was just another wandering giant or two. I pulled us back to the blue perimeter when we realised there were more of them, and to the black one when we realised they were organised. And when General Jensen came on the radio, saying we’d hold the black line no matter what, that Denmark was relying on us, that it was do-or-die… I drove us back to Oresund.”

He shook his head and smiled an empty smile.

“And now I’m here. Last of my regiment. So yes, I was there. By rights, I should still be there.”

“You saved your crew,” Mikkel pointed out.

“No. I forced them to be cowards like me,” Hansen said quietly.

Mikkel didn’t know what to say to that.

“One more tank couldn’t have made a difference,” Hansen said. “I saw what was coming out of the city. The whole world could have stood against that and it would have steamrolled us all the same.”

He sighed. “But that’s no excuse.”

Mikkel was about to say something, but Hansen was too quick for him. “Hey, you’re going back to triage, right? That’s next to the armoury?” he asked, like he’d had a great idea.

“Yeah,” said Mikkel, warily.

For the first time he turned to fully face Mikkel, and Mikkel saw the holster on the man’s hip.

“Do me a favour and take this back to them when I’m done with it,” Hansen said, with the weariest expression Mikkel had ever seen on his face, as he pulled out his pistol and lifted it towards his head.

Days later Mikkel would marvel at how _that_ , of all things, had been the man’s last request. But at that moment all he could think about was stopping him. His eyes went wide and he lunged forward, hurling himself across the metre or two that separated them, shouting some half-formed cry at the man not to be a bloody fool.

He caught Hansen just as his finger was tightening on the trigger and yanked the gun away from the other man’s head – and, he realised with a split-second’s horror, straight towards himself.

The gun was unbelievably loud. The sound hit him like a physical bow and Mikkel would swear for the rest of his life that he actually _saw_ the muzzle flash, a quick flare of white bursting from the gun. At the same time a white-hot streak of pain carved its way down his arm and he screamed in agony. He lost his balance and the pair of them toppled to the floor, Mikkel back towards the cargo crate behind him, Hansen sideways towards the railings.

His head spinning and his ears ringing, Mikkel looked down at his arm. There was a ribbon of red on his sleeve, bloody muscle peeping out from under torn fabric. He clutched the wound with his good hand and gasped in pain.

Opposite him, Hansen staggered to his feet, the gun still clutched in one hand. He looked down at Mikkel, at the blood dripping from Mikkel’s arm, and Mikkel saw something give way behind the man’s eyes.

He couldn’t hear what Hansen was saying because of the dull ringing in his ears, but he saw him mouth something that might have been “sorry.” He backed up to the railings, raised the gun again, and gave Mikkel just enough time to look away.

The gun roared. There was a brief silence that seemed to stretch forever.

And then the background noises of Oresund started fading back in as Mikkel’s battered hearing slowly cleared. The rumble of engines from below. The faint creak of metal shifting and settling as the morning sun slowly warmed it. The chatter of hundreds of voices. Footsteps hurrying towards him, shouts of confusion as they drew nearer.

The only sound Mikkel noticed was the faint _splash_ of something hitting the straits below.

 

* * *

 

Mikkel went to take another sip but stopped with the bottle halfway to his lips and carefully screwed the cap back on. There was a time and a place for that sort of thing, and night in the silent world was definitely not it.

Sigrun was the one to break the silence that followed. “You know, I sometimes wonder why you ever signed up for this expedition, doc,” she said as he rolled his sleeve back down.

Mikkel squinted at her, unsure of her meaning, wondering whether he ought to take offence at that or not.

“I mean, we’ve all had setbacks,” she carried on, oblivious, gazing out of the windscreen of the tank at the desolate landscape beyond. “Hell, even Iceland’s lost a few battles, although they don’t like to talk about it. But you guys… and Kastrup…” she trailed off and made an expansive gesture, as if she didn’t know the words to describe the magnitude of what had happened.

“I wouldn’t have come back,” she said suddenly, fixing him with an expression that Mikkel didn’t recognise for a second. “A team of oxen couldn’t have dragged me over that bridge again. And yet... here you are. Like it’s nothing.”

That expression was admiration, Mikkel realised with something approaching amazement. Sigrun was impressed with someone who wasn’t herself. He felt strangely honoured.

A yawn caught him by surprise and he felt his eyelids start to droop. He stood up and moved back into the body of the tank, back towards his makeshift bunk on the floor. Sigrun didn’t follow him. Instead she shifted in her seat, getting comfortable. Still not willing to risk sleeping again just yet, despite the alcohol. Just in case.

Mikkel paused, halfway through the doorway. “Equally, it could be that I’m here because Trond had some _excellent_ blackmail material on me,” he said, offhandly, as if it was nothing. Sigrun laughed.

“Save that story for another night,” she grinned.


End file.
